of the rare insight and understanding of legal matters which his favorite daughter had possessed, and her early death had left a lonely place in the good man’s heart.  Miss Prince’s life at Oldfields must have been very dull, especially since her boarding-school days were over.  For himself he had a great prejudice against the usurpation of men’s duties and prerogatives by women, and had spoken of all such assumptions with contempt.  It made a difference that this attractive young student had spoken bravely on the wrong side; but if he had thought much about it he would have made himself surer and surer that only time was needed to show her the mistake.  If he had gone deeper into the subject he would have said that he thought it all nonsense about women’s having the worst of it in life; he had known more than one good fellow who had begun to go down hill from the day he was married, and if girls would only take the trouble to fit themselves for their indoor business the world would be a vastly more comfortable place.  And as for their tinkering at the laws, such projects should be bitterly resented.

It only needed a few days to make it plain to this good fellow that the coming of one of the summer guests had made a great difference in his life.  It was easy to find a hundred excuses for going to Miss Prince’s, who smiled benignantly upon his evident interest in the fair stranger within her gates.  The truth must be confessed, however, that the episode of the lamed shoulder at the picnic party had given Mr. George Gerry great unhappiness.  There was something so high and serene in Anna Prince’s simplicity and directness, and in the way in which she had proved herself adequate to so unusual an occasion, that he could not help mingling a good deal of admiration with his dissatisfaction.  It is in human nature to respect power; but all his manliness was at stake, and his natural rights would be degraded and lost, if he could not show his power to be greater than her own.  And as the days went by, every one made him more certain that he longed, more than he had ever longed for anything before, to win her love.  His heart had never before been deeply touched, but life seemed now like a heap of dry wood, which had only waited for a live coal to make it flame and leap in mysterious light, and transfigure itself from dullness into a bewildering and unaccountable glory.  It was no wonder any longer that poets had sung best of love and its joys and sorrows, and that men and women, since the world began, had followed at its call.  All life and its history was explained anew, yet this eager lover felt himself to be the first discoverer of the world’s great secret.