who drop a strange and subtle poison, which falling often into the most generous wine poured out by their contemporaries, chills and impoverishes it, and even gives it a taint which may prove deadly to some. And if there be woe to those who have lived for themselves alone, and who leave the world poorer and not richer for their having been in it, surely there must be woe, woe - a thousand times woe! — for those who have so lived that they have made the unselfishness of others seem to be folly - and have stamped the nobility of self-forgetfulness as mere madness! For the former only lay waste the plains of earth, but the latter poison the wellsprings of heaven.

masterpieces of other minds; that he | But the story had its influence nevertheseemed not to care to risk rising to the less. The selfishness of those dead womheight of his own genius, but was content en's lives had left its pernicious trail beto toil on level lines, which brought him | hind them. From every life—nay, from safe profit. He had been called merce- every event in every life - there is disnary and sordid. His mother had spoken tilled an essence, a medicine or a poison of him as if he had sadly disappointed to be the blessing or the bane of the lives her; it had been discovered that his sis- or the events which follow. And while ters did not trouble themselves even to go some leave the precious legacy of their to see his pictures. People had pitied life's wine poured out in loving service, the mother and sisters for their withered and others the strange bequest of their hopes, whose fruition might well have life's wine turned to vinegar by its reserlifted them out of their narrow life of elevation for themselves, there are yet others gant leisure and genteel economies into one of affluence and influence. But the mother and sisters dropped away, dying not long after each other. Then it had been noticed that the brother's stream of merely salable work grew slack; that he treated himself to some travelling and to some leisure, the result of which was a picture which presently made his name. People said that all this was the beneficial consequence of his entering on his mother's little fortune, and one or two got so far as to hint that, under all the circumstances, she might surely have made some self-denying arrangements in his favor during her lifetime. One acquaintance, bolder than the rest, had ventured to ask how much he had inherited. And the Olive Sinclair went back to Shetland artist had quietly answered, "Only about alone, to select and carry away such remone hundred and fifty pounds a year, but nants of the old home as she and her the sense of security and of relief from mother might venture to keep. The constant responsibility was the real bless-"merchant" at Wallness undertook to ing," and he had been judged a poor spirited creature to have had so little courage to fight the battle of life on his own account. And it was only after he was dead, when his one or two bosom friends were at liberty to speak out, that the general public learned that from the very first, those leisurely critical women had been dependent upon him for every morsel of bread they put into their mouths, and that all he had "inherited" had been the cessation of the need for supplying their wants, and of the fear lest he might fail to provide for their future.

"That man was a fool," decided Robert Sinclair. And perhaps he was; but there is some folly which is nearly divine, as there is some seeming wisdom which is altogether devilish. It was a pity that true story should have had any existence, so that it could come into Robert Sinclair's mind just then. He did not accept it as any guiding for himself. He was not yet base enough to think that without discretion and reserve on his part, Mrs. Sinclair and Olive might develop into such chill vampires as the artist's family.

convey these in his cart from Quodda to Lerwick, and to ship them to Kirkwall in a little vessel he used for his own trading purposes. He seemed at first to have a curious hesitancy about undertaking the business, but in the end he named a charge for it which gave him a very fair profit.

"I would not have taken any money at all if it had been from the old lady and the lassie," he remarked afterwards, "but there's the young fellow to the fore, doing so well everybody says, and hand in glove with that Brander of St. Ola's, who is screwing all he can out of us."

Olive paid the money. She thought the charge ample, but she made no observation, though she could not help remembering many a difficult account which her father had cast, and many a tangled correspondence which he had unravelled in quite a friendly way, for the old merchant in bygone days.

Then she said good-bye to all the simple neighbors. The expressions of their sympathy concerning the sad changes in the family, and of their congratulation

concerning her brother's future, were alike | on the fire. But now she knew where to received rather silently. She had never draw a line far within the limit of her been very popular in Quodda, though healthy young appetite, and she learned everybody had always thought her clever how to make up a peat fire, not so as to far more clever than Robert. "If she get the most warmth from it, but so as to had been the boy instead of the girl she make it last the longest. would have done wonders," they said to each other, watching the cart as it drove away, with Olive seated behind her house. hold gods; looking, not back at the villagers, but out upon the blue sea and the familiar rocks.

"I don't feel as if I could work for myself," she thought. "But I can work for mother. And I suppose that is the way God always spares one something to give one strength! And if father thought too well of everybody else, why, there's only the more need that I should justify his faith in me."

And then, in their lodging in Kirkwall, the mother and daughter began that sort of life whose story is never fully written. They went out of the temporary furnished lodgings in which Mr. Sinclair had died, but they did not require to leave the house. The landlady, a poor widow herself, found them an empty attic, low-roofed and queercornered, for which she would ask but a humble rent.

"One room will do for us in the mean time," observed Mrs. Sinclair. "Robert will not take a holiday to come so far north very soon, and by then we may have got into something better."

"One room will do for us in the mean time," responded Olive, but she echoed her mother's speech no further.

Yet it is only when we get down to these barren places of life that we find how rich their soil really is, if only it be properly developed. Olive began to discover that the midnight moonlight and the ruddy dawn have a secret of their own, which they keep only for those eyes which rest on their beauty a while, when hard work is over, or ere hard work begins. She began to feel as if she had private rights in the grand old cathedral on which her little window looked.

"What should we do without St. Magnus, mother?" she would ask cheerily. “How good it was of all those unknown men in the dark ages to rear its beauty for our delight! And I believe they did it all the better, that I don't suppose they thought much of posterity, but rather of the worship of God, and of doing a good day's work for those they loved."

Olive found, too, that when one gets down on a level with the poorest, so that they trust one with the real secrets of their life, one finds that there is a good deal of Spartan endurance and of quiet self-sacrifice still going forward in the world.

In after years Olive Sinclair did not find those days of strain and stress at all bad to remember. She used to say then, that she believed by the time she was an old woman she would be chiefly interesting on account of what she could tell of that period.

At first, while Olive was looking for work, they had to make some inroad on the insurance money. But that inroad Olive was determined should not long But then memory, with its curious continue. She got a little daily teaching, alchemy for extracting pleasure from pain, which brought in a few weekly shillings, always rejects pain from which pleasure barely sufficient to pay for their food. cannot be extracted. The true suffering Then she got an evening engagement to of those hard days was that, during, their keep a tradesman's ledgers; this brought course, Olive felt as if she could plant no in a monthly stipend which would just cheerful hope in any "after years," could meet the rent. Early in the morning, late foresee nothing but one long course of at night, and in the intervals between her lonely, ill-requited, unremitting toil, unteaching and her book-keeping, she toiled cheered by sympathy or appreciation. at knitting and at white seam. The gains There was no possibility of saving, it was of such labors were indeed infinitesimal, as much as they could do to pay their but they must not be despised, because way, scanty as were their needs; a few they were needed. She found out what evil days would plunge them at once in economy means when it has to be exer- debt-either to Robert or to somebody cised, not in cash but in kind. At Quodda and Olive soon began to feel that it schoolhouse, despite the chronic scarcity would be almost more galling to accept of money, there had always been a certain aid even for her mother from him than humble affluence; nobody had had to from strangers; and to think, too, that study how much they could afford to eat, such a feeling was very unnatural, and or whether they might put another peat that she must be very wicked to indulge

able; of the little suppers he gave among the young brokers and their more youthful clients, foolish youths of fashion who were fain to hope to meet their extravagances by dabbling a little in speculation, and of whom therefore "something might be made." Tom had been asked to sev eral of these little suppers, and had gone

in it. And yet why? Must there not | progresses; of the dinner parties he so ever be a deadly bitterness in taking alms constantly attended, where his dress and from those whose justice would have appointments were of the most irreproachsaved us from need for them? As for any ambitions of her own, even the laudable one of providing for her own future, for the helpless old age that must come at last after the longest life of toil, Olive soon realized that she must harbor none. 'Perhaps Robert will keep me then out of charity," she thought, still not without some bitterness, "and perhaps he will have a wife who will look askance at me for needing help, and will give me an old dress and a moral lecture." And Olive was right enough in her keen judgment of the way of the world, though she blamed herself for the edge on her words. For with those who think that to be lucky and rich is in itself to be meritorious, to be poor from whatever cause or course of events is to be disgraceful; he who, like Jack Horner,

Puts in his thumb and pulls out a plum,

And cries, "What a good boy am I!" is sure to agree with the poet's "new style Northern Farmer,".

That the poor in a loomp is bad.

At other times, Olive would look bravely forward to the very workhouse itself. "If one has to go there after one has done one's very best, one does not need to blush for one's self, but for the world," she reflected. These sombre meditations were reserved for herself alone, for her mother she had only bright announcements of her latest triumph in the way of earning or sparing.

Letters reached them from Tom Ollison oftener than from Robert Sinclair. Tom had written a frank and friendly letter in response to the telegram which had intrusted him with news of the father's death, and the correspondence had continued since. His epistles were the one breeze from an active, prospering outer life, which stirred the two women's mo notonous days. Mrs. Sinclair rejoiced in the coming of those letters, because they gave her some assurance of her son's welfare, though when Tom's allusions to Robert seemed rather curt and guarded, she often feared lest Tom had seen that he was looking ill or overworked, and was keeping something back. And so in truth Tom was, but it was not what she dreaded. Little as young Ollison knew how it really was with Mrs. Sinclair and her daughter, he felt an instinctive reluctance to tell them of Robert's social

once.

Probably, despite these seeming extravagances, Robert Sinclair's expenditure was not large, it was only made exclusively for what in his eyes was his own benefit. Tom could not understand Robert. His habits seemed steady, he drank little, he held somewhat aloof from the fast talk of the men whom yet he gathered about him perhaps gaining weight with them by so doing. He made an outward profession of religion. But all his being was absorbed in one thought, that of "getting on." The scramble seemed but to grow fiercer, the nearer he got to the goal of fortune; but then, alas! fortune has no goal-it ever recedes, often only to vanish in thin air at last.

Tom said to Robert more than once, concerning his thoughts, his ways, and his friends, were these true, were those quite upright, were the friends worthy? Robert did not say much in self-defence. He only persisted in the thoughts and the ways, made more friends of the same sort, and saw the less of Tom. Life is full of such separations.

Olive marked her mother's rapidly ageing face. She noted that her mother spoke less than of old. She would sit in silence for hours now, and her loving manner towards her daughter changed to one of absolutely supplicating clinging. It seemed to Olive sometimes as if her mother was actually asking her pardon for still loving the son, who showed so little love in return.

CHAPTER XIV.

A SECRET HISTORY.

DURING one of the conversations which Robert and Tom had together, soon after the return of the former from the north, young Sinclair said, rather suddenly, and apropos of nothing which had gone be fore,

"Tom, do you know anything particular about your Mr. Sandison?"

Tom Ollison looked up at him with a quick, puzzled glance. The question

seemed to have a strangely familiar ring it did not mean to him quite the same about it as if he had heard it before an experience which we have all of us known, and which has given rise to many elaborate theories concerning the action of the dual brain, and to more startling ones about pre-existence. Probably such experiences are generally to be attributed to nothing more than a sudden quickening, by some new combination of circumstance, of some old line of thought and feeling, and our memory is not of the word or action which seems to stir it, but of a recurring mood of our own.

which it had meant in days when he had thought he believed it, and would have argued stoutly in defence of its very words. (The alphabet is not the same to us, after we have learned to read, as it is when we are learning its letters.) Atheism was not now to him the frightful mystery which it is to those who seem to fear that God's existence may be endangered if it should ever be denied by the majority of his children, who can only live and move and have their being in him, as he in them. He now saw man as related to God, in the deepest part of his nature, as he is in his bodily existence to air and earth and fire and water; and he saw that by them man breathed and fed, and was warmed and refreshed, before he could articulate their names, and even if he was so blind or so idiotic that he could not see or comprehend them. Tom could recognize atheism and infidelity as the spiritual iconoclasts of the world, even as Judaism and Mahomedanism had been its idol-breakers, emptying shrines of maimed or distorted images, to make way for the living form of the God-man. That memory of his own good father tenderly tending him through the foolish rage of his delirium had stood Tom in good stead again and again. God could never dis own his children who did not love him, because they did not know him, or could not see his face. His other children could only love him the more for such pain and such patience. And as for Peter Sandison, was there not perpetual prayer in those pathetic eyes of his? and for what were they forever seeking, if not for God himself?

Tom did not ask what "it" was. He always bitterly repented of having confided Grace's assertion to Robert. It was not so much that he yet doubted its truth, in the bald, materialistic sense of a fact. But since those early days he had himself been down into the depths - into depths Tom Ollison was glad of one thing: from which he felt he could never have that even in those early days, wherein risen, but for a clinging, childlike faith one is so tempted to repose confidences that God was with him even there, and in those with whom we are already familhad hold of him even in the dark, and iar concerning those who are still stran that God knew and believed in Tom Olli-gers, he had never yielded to the tempta son, while Tom Ollison could not know tion to tell Robert of the sealed leaves of or believe in God! And suppose Tom Ollison had been still in those depths, would God have grown tired of him and let him drop? Perish the ideal Then, too, in rising out of those depths, Tom had not scrambled back to the brink whence he had fallen; that would be no salvation from any Slough of Despond. God had brought him out, like the Psalm ist of old, into "a wealthy place," upon the richer soil nearer the Celestial City. Tom could say his creed again, now, firmly and joyfully-feeling, indeed, that he had never believed it before; but then

the Sandison Bible, or of the strange inoccupancy and desertion of the best rooms of the Sandison house. The latter fact did not seem to have struck Robert, whose brief visits had been quite naturally passed in the dining-room and in his friend's own apartment.

Robert observed that Tom allowed his last remark to pass without response, and he drew an unfavorable inference from it. Probably Tom was getting "queer" him. self. Well, there was really so much free thought among the members of the learned societies in whose libraries Tom's