bread and butter and peach preserves, knowing where Dorothy had kept everything. A sound in the other room startled her, but she repressed an exclamation. It was only John, coming down with a look of gaunt, white misery on his tearless countenance, and standing beside the coffin, with a gesture that went to the hearts of his friends. John had idolized Dorothy. They had been married only a year. This was their new house, built and furnished to suit her. Every bit of it was eloquent of Dorothy. John, too, was saying dumbly in a passion of mute rebellion, “What could the Lord have been thinkin' of?"

Kind Mrs. Cranfells went to the stricken man, and persuaded him to come into the warm kitchen and have a bite of supper. She and Miss Rachel Ann gazed, for a moment, at the beautiful, silent figure of their friend. A nameless peace and dignity lay upon that lovely, queenly face.

The man sat down by the table and tried to eat, but the food choked him. He put his head down on his hands and shook with great sobs.

"There! there!" said Mrs. Cranfells, patting his shoulder soothingly, "you've nothing to reproach yourself with, so don't fret this way, John."

"I have," he broke out. "I tried her patience lots of times. I brought mud in on my boots and tracked up her clean floor. I had the house painted white when she wanted it gray. I wouldn't let her join the church when she wanted to last Easter, because I wasn't ready to join, too. I've been cross, and scolded when the cooking didn't suit me. Oh! Dorothy, Dorothy, Dorothy, come back, and you'll see how changed I'll be !"

He tramped heavily off upstairs, and the women looked at each other in grieved dismay. "It's always so; when folks are gone, we wish we'd been nicer to them, don't we?" Miss Rachel Ann remarked.

"John was right good to Dorothy," said Mrs. Cranfells.

The clock struck one!

"You lie down on the lounge and kiver yourself with that quilt, Rachel Ann, and I'll take a nap in this easy cheer. We're doin' Dorothy no good."

If the three-the husband and the two friends-could have followed Dorothy behind that screen of silence men call death, they might not have grieved so sorrowfully. Dorothy Raimond had never been so vividly awake, so resplendently alive, as when her last breath floated away, and her soul, dropping the body, went light and free along the immortal road.

She was conscious of a strange gladness, a wonderful poise and freedom. As she walked beside a sparkling river, the flowers that touched her garment's hem were more fragrant than the roses. She walked with the elastic tread of a child, and first one, then another dear friend met her, and gave her greeting. Her mother, whom she had lost when she was a baby, came running over a green meadow, and folded happy arms about her, folded her closely. Her little sister Sadie, and her brother Ralph, were just behind; a troop of dear schoolmates; a girl especially whom she had loved and missed, one Pearl Maleen, all made her so welcome.

I'm so

"You are just the same Dorothy," said her mother, "though you were so little when I came home. glad you are here."

Angels moved to and fro. They seemed very busy. "You see," said Pearl, "they are forever flying around on the King's errands."

"Don't you do the King's errands, too?" asked Dorothy. "Oh, yes, but not in the same way. They return to the earth, ascending and descending. We go no more out, after we have seen our Lord."

So they talked, and all around were friends talking, and Dorothy had glimpses of wide, beautiful homes, full of pictures and flowers, and the very air was sweet and buoyant

and song seemed to fill it and make its background; song that was a radiance, alternating with silence that was a

caress.

In the very middle of the gladness, there penetrated to Dorothy, a long, strange, wailing cry.

"Dorothy! Dorothy! Come back, my beloved!"

"It is John," she murmured. "John. He needs me." She made a mighty plunge into space, and awoke. Mrs. Cranfells shook Miss Rachel violently. Her face was as white as chalk. Her hands were shaking.

"There's a noise," she said, "in Dorothy's room." Miss Rachel opened the door. She started back in sheer affright. Dorothy was sitting up in her coffin.

"I'm alive, Aunt Rachel," she cried, "where's John?" Dorothy lived many, many years, and was on old, old woman before she finally went to her heavenly home. But her descendants still tell how she lay three days in a trance and heard and saw unutterable things. Never was wife so adored, for John always knew she had been given back to him from the very portals of the grave.

THE SENATOR'S DEBT

"WHAT a charming man Senator Blank is; so genial, so

WHAT full of real bonhomie, and so eloquent on the floor.

He has every quality for leadership. But where did he get that insignificant little wife; such a dowdy, so unused to society, so primitive? A wife like that is a positive handicap in Washington! Why do men marry so early, before they reach their full development and know their needs? And when they have made a mistake like that, why not leave that sort of wife at home, safely secluded in her native air?" Emily Borden poured forth this tirade without stopping for breath. She and her friend, an elderly lady, had just come from the beautiful Congressional Library, and had passed the Senator, an old friend of Mrs. Fanwood's, on the street. Mrs. Fanwood was a woman of sixty, who knew everybody and remembered everything. A fountain of agreeable anecdote and correct information. She was welcome at any dinner table and in any drawing-room, as welcome as the youngest belle of the season, and far more entertaining than she. Emily Borden, from college a year ago, and from New York at the moment, was Mrs. Fanwood's guest.

"Senator Blank owes his wife so large a debt of gratitude, my child," she said, as Emily finished her speech, "that a whole lifetime of devotion on his part can never pay it. The score between them would be formidable if there were not so much true love on both sides." "Please explain. I don't understand."

"Of course you don't understand. How should you! But when the Senator married Mary Pillsbury, in a little backwoods town of North Carolina, he was keeping the country store. He sold women's dresses and sunbonnets,

molasses, soap, flour, hardware, cider, sugar, baking powder, tinned goods, biscuits, stationery, and whatever else is sold in a country store. He was fond of reading, but had only a limited education. The one wish of his heart was to know books and to study law. But the path to learning for him had been blocked by poverty. He had never known anything but grinding care.

"Mary said to him one evening, 'Dick, honey, you go ahead and study, I'll keep the store.' They were very poor, and they had two children. The husband laughed at her. But the next day, the next week, the next month, the wife repeated her plea. Dick's old mother, who used to sit by the fire smoking a clay pipe, one day stood up and put her wrinkled hand on the young man's shoulder.

"My boy,' she said, 'Mary's right. She'll manage. I'm pretty strong yet, I'll help her; you go to college.'

"Dick went. He worked hard to pay his way, and the women worked hard at home. Just after he had finished college and the law school, the old mother died. The wife had no time to cultivate her mind, or study the arts of dress. She had undertaken to carry a heavy load; she had tackled a big job. The store was made to pay till the law office supplanted it. Dick went into politics. He rose rapidly, like Jonah's gourd, I think. Here he is now; the younger children are at good schools. The older boys are at West Point and Harvard, and the little dowdy mother and insignificant wife is where she ought to be, with the man she helped make. Emily, I could stoop and kiss the hem of her dress, I honor her so deeply."

"But, Mrs. Fanwood, she is common. She never could have been pretty. And she is not adaptable."

"Common she is not. She is the real thing; a sincere, strong, lovable, patriotic American woman, true to the core. In its way, an earthen jug that is real, surpasses a bit of plated ware. There are depths of tenderness in that soul; there is a fund of kindness; there is common sense. She