"Treated you coldly!" she replied. "You have not been here for the last fortnight. You have been all devotion to Virginia Grant."

"Nonsense," he answered. "I don't care a rush for Virginia Grant, and you know it, though she has been an interesting patient. I have been fighting for a man's life, dearest. Old Anthony Gilbert has been desperately ill, but he is going to pull through. There has been a lot of sickness. Yet I came twice to this tree at our trysting time when I was dead tired, too, and no Euphemia to greet me. Was that fair? Can you not trust me, when we are to be married in October, too? There, darling, don't cry." But they were happy tears that he kissed away, and next day Uncle Jabez' check went back to him.

THE "SPITE FENCE"

L

UTHER SHERWOOD and his wife were iingering over their breakfast longer than usual, because of a letter which had come in the morning mail. It referred to a bit of meadow land in a village some twenty miles from New York. Within ten years this particular village had sprung into being and grown with the rapidity of Jack's famous bean-stalk. A railroad had brought the quiet farming country near enough the great city to make it attractive to people who longed for gardens and fresh air and a play-place for their children out of doors.

The bit of meadow land was all that was left of what had originally been a large farm, and it had been a wedding present to Mary Sherwood from an uncle who had sold the rest of his estate, and who told Mary to do with this precisely as she pleased. Before her marriage to Luther, who was a rising young lawyer, Mary had been a hardworking hospital nurse. One of her dreams had been to live in the country and gaze upon the hills which rimmed around the little valley where she had spent much of her childhood. They were low hills, friendly and kind, not the great stern mountains, but hills where children could play and lovers could stroll, with green spaces and trees that turned to red and gold in the autumn and made a protecting wall around the valley in the spring and sum

mer.

Mr. Sherwood looked up from the letter as his wife. handed him his cup of coffee. "The real estate man has an offer, Mary, for your wedding present. His client of

fers to pay a generous price, considerably more than it is valued by anybody else. The man is in Italy, and will be there for a while yet. He already has large holdings in Forestville, and he has built a superb house on the site of your grandfather's old home. For some reason he especially wants the piece of ground where we have been intending to build our bungalow. Do vou wish to consider the offer?"

Mary lifted her brown eyes, and her husband saw that there was no indecision in her glance. She answered without an instant's hesitation: "Whoever the man may be, Luther, he has not money enough to tempt me. We have the plans for our bungalow, and we can afford to build it without the delay of a month. I have furnished every room in my fancy. I know what is going in the south chamber, in the west room, in the dining-room and the living-room. We shall be as cosy as birds in a nest, and I can hardly wait for the time to come when we shall be householders under God's blue sky, and not go on being homeless tramps in the stifling city."

"Is this boarding-house your idea, wife. of a shelter for homeless tramps?"

"Yes, Luther, with all its luxury it is unhomelike. I am sorry to disappoint King Ahab. This persistent customer reminds me of him. We shall keep our little corner of the earth for ourselves and here we shall build our bungalow."

They carried out their plan, and as houses go up like magic when there is no strike to interfere with the labors of mason and carpenter, and the people who build have cash in hand to make their fairy dreams material, no lengthened period elapsed before the Sherwoods were safe in their own domicile. They had windows on every side, and Mary's special delight was the view from her south chamber across a field or two. The green hills that she loved seemed to her like guardian angels. A sleeping porch on

this side of the house gave it the last touch of comfort and luxury, and she went about her home-making with a light heart and little bursts of happy song.

Several months passed before the Dormans, who were her nearest neighbors, and whose garden wall came close to her boundary line, returned from their trip abroad. They had not been at home a month, when early one morning a number of workmen suddenly appeared with loads of lumber. Luther, glancing from the window, wondered what they meant to do, and Mary said she hoped they did not mean to build a shelter for cows or a series of chicken coops at this end of their plantation.

The hen coops and the cow shed would have been preferable to the sort of building John Dorman speedily erected. Higher and higher it rose, a broad and gloomy fence near enough the Sherwood home to shut out completely their view of the hills and to make the south chamber, which was Mary's especial pride, a prison cell instead of an airy lodgment. The sleeping porch was not ruined for sleeping purposes, but it, too, was robbed of its greatest attractiveness, and the spite fence, a great, ill tempered barrier, reared itself, a blot upon the landscape and an eyesore which Luther and Mary resented hour by hour, as they looked upon it.

Remonstrance proved in vain. Mr. Dorman declared himself within his legal rights, and upon investigation Mr. Sherwood found himself helpless. "Sell me your bungalow," said the millionaire; "give me the land I want and settle anywhere else in this village that you choose. There are plenty of other spots in Forestville where you would be as comfortable as you are in this neighborhood. Unless you oblige me, my fence shall remain where it is."

Luther might have yielded, but the blood of the Puritans flowed in the veins of Mary and she obstinately declined so much as to consider any proposition coming from the Dormans. One day as she was sitting with her book

on the other side of the house where she could not see the objectionable fence, she had a visitor. It was John Dorman's wife. The lady approached Mary timidly. "My dear," she said, "you know who I am. I want you to know that I hate that fence as much as you do, and am ashamed of it through and through. I have used every argument in my power, but my husband is as stubborn as the Rock of Gibraltar. I had to come and tell you and let you know that I have had no share in this wretched business. As woman to woman, I have come to ask you to forgive John and pray with me that something may break down his wicked obstinacy."

Something did break down his obstinacy, and that before many days. John Dorman had one idol whom he loved and worshiped. It was not his gentle wife, whose influence with him was so slight that she could not move him from his purpose; it was his only daughter, Mabel, fifteen, the light of his eyes and the pride of his heart. He had a heart. Most men have. The testing time came when Mabel was suddenly taken desperately ill between midnight and morning. The doctor, sent for in a hurry, said that he must have a nurse at once, and when Mr. Dorman spoke of telephoning to the city, declared he could not wait. "The best hospital nurse I ever knew," said Dr. Trent, "is living right next door; Mrs. Sherwood, who used to be Mary Bean. She will come if I ask her, and if the little girl is to be saved there is not an hour to lose. Not a minute, in fact. Stand aside, man, and let me get to the telephone."

There is a verse in the Bible about heaping coals of fire on the head of one's foe. When Mary Sherwood, practical, efficient and resourceful, entered the home of John Dorman and labored hour after hour with Dr. Trent to save the life of John Dorman's child, the ice in his heart thawed swiftly before the blaze of her compassionate goodness. When at last the danger was over and the doctor,