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FTER all one's labors, pacing and dancing and standing and bowing, what a life it is!" said a husky voice from the bed. It's owner, grayfaced, unshaven, and fearfully thin, coughed with pain and looked wistfully out upon the dressing-glass and a beauty absorbed. in the settling of a pompon. This beauty's bloom was entirely natural, and no woman's face in Portsmouth could bear the comparison. She belittled everybody near her. No wonder the husband, dying be

hind the bed curtains, now drawn far apart for air, looked hungrily at her. But she pulled off and redisposed the pompon, and fastened with careful particularity the old clasps of her jewels.

"Wait till November, and then you'll get a pretty taste of the blasts there," gasped the lean man in the bed. "Running along those cold passages, then bursting into a room fit to bake you, then back again into a whiff from the stairs enough to blow you a mile off!

You'll have your share, ma'am, I promise you that! You'll get laid up in three days, take my word for that!"

And the Honorable Theodore Atkinson, secretary of the province, lay panting among his pillows, too proud to show pain of spirit, but craving notice like all sick people; craving notice which his handsome young wife did not care about bestowing upon him apparently. And this question of the winter subscription to the assemblies was a vexed one, already fought hotly enough with mother Atkinson; fought not at all in the great sick room, where her fading husband lay all day, with his high-backed chair, his moreen curtains, and his fire flickering on the polished andirons, for company.

"Columb does let the plum porridge cool," said the sick man whimsically, and smiling faintly. "And 'tis merely the first assembly to-night, Frances. The time you are in here is the best hour of my day!" And he stopped, pale and exhausted.

"If 'twould do you any good," said the beautiful young woman sweetly, as if she was saying a pleasant thing. "But it is to go and be fine in my best, and then for the minuet with—with Colonel Michael, maybe; or it's here in a coolish room with the lonely wind coming up the bay and you, to be sure," she added a trifle ashamed.

"Tis no comparison," came from the pallid lips in the bed, dryly. And Mrs. Frances Deering Atkinson looking forth through the little diamond-shaped window panes at the street steeped in mellow October sunlight, was for an in stant struck with a melancholy very foreign to her ease-loving nature. Very likely the faint sweet scent of the fallen leaves suggested that it was possibly her husband's last night in the world, for the physicians had warned that the end would be "almost any time." She was a little frightened to find that she did not mind. Then she shook out her suit of silk upon tiffany, delicate and pretty, and going hastily to the bed put her tiny hand into the transparent hot fingers thrust out to receive it.

Nothing was said. Mr. Atkinson was a young man, but he was used to his

treatment, and his lady was wholly careless that she was throwing a very good love away. And then came in Columb with the invalid's supper, and Mrs. Atkinson, with a vague smile and a slight tuck to his bedclothes, shimmered downstairs, a tall and peerless married belle of old Portsmouth.

The table of the eating parlor was laid with a high tea, dimly showing by four candles in silver sticks. The tea service of odd little china cups and saucers was set ready to her hand at the head of the long table, full of pretty and hearty dishes, with butter shaped like a pineapple served with scraped beef, garnished with a wreath of curled parsley, custards in glasses with toast in long sippets, a dish of buttered lobsters, beans served with cream sauce, roasted potatoes, collared pig's head next a plate of cheese cakes, and gooseberry fool by a platter of scollops. At this table stood awaiting her a stout man, but very upright, manly and fashionable, with a glance her way of easy power.

It was a very charming woman who poured the tea by the light of the candles, expressing as she did, by every movement of her eloquent person, her pleasure in her company, although the meal progressed but silently, being full of a language of looks and of that magnetism by which some people in every generation can comprehend each other wordlessly. The handsome man sitting by her, gotten up with the last refinement of the old regime style of dress, certainly made a very effective and pleasing picture, in his turn, as the esquire of the delicately frilled and adorned lady, His hostess, for her part, sat a trifle awed before the royal governor of the province, for he was no less, and gazed approvingly upon his white, heavily jewelled hands as he lifted his egg-shell-like teacup.

Madam Atkinson was in her best looks, to-night, her guest thought, surveying her finely moulded bare arms. Decidedly, to a modern mind, his manners were what were to be expected of a man who so openly courted a matron in her own house.

"And Colonel Michael Wentworth is to lead the minuet," said the beauty, her

whole manner bespeaking a lady all alive. "I'm glad I'm not to miss it. Do you see, sir, I'm in all my fineries?" and she playfully turned her extraordinarily dressed head, which shone with grotesquely large pins of very good stones.

The young Governor John Wentworth, who had sailed to England to make his fortune, exceedingly in love with Frances Deering of Boston, and had returned with it made, and with a bachelor heart very ready to be given anew to Mrs. Frances Deering Atkinson, ten times handsomer than ever, and nursing a hectic spouse, was especially taken by a certain little indolence which characterized this Portsmouth beauty at the tea board. Hotblooded and hasty himself, he had a delightful sense of drinking in leisure in the society of his old flame, who had a grace of gentle breeding which never forsook her, though in real refinement of feeling and habit there was nothing to choose between this daring pair, already the theme of all the tea tables up and down Court and Vaughan Streets.

Yet Madam Atkinson was obliged to miss Colonel Michael and the minuet. For all over the old house, in its stillness, doors commenced to slam, with a running up and down stairs, and with many a tumultuous sign of change multiplying about the eating parlor wherein the young mistress of the mansion sat dismayed, with her exquisite tint deserting her. The door was thrown violently open, and a red-faced, heavy man appeared in the doorway.

"Madam, your husband is no more," said he harshly, but quaveringly, the words evidently hurting him.

"I can't go. I can't go up there. O what shall I do!" poor Mrs. Atkinson screamed, all her caprices, as natural to her as the foam is to the wave, miserably gone, leaving her trembling like a leaf in the wind, with uncontrollable cowardice, but looking significantly into the blue eyes of the governor for help, and not at all upon Dr. Moses in the doorway, who stood surveying both with much indignation.

"If you do not hand Mrs. Atkinson to the chamber stairs," said the doctor, in an angry guttural, "your Excellency ain't fit to carry garbage to a bear."

"Man, you are too bold," said Governor John Wentworth, flushing. "You must either recall your words, or quit Mrs. Atkinson's service."

"Well, I will take them back," said the doctor. "You are fit." And he turned on his heel.

"You must go up at once, dear," said the governor gently. "'Tis expected. Faith he's been good to you. I don't see how you can keep away. 'Tis all over, sweetheart!" he whispered again, with a pressure of the polished shoulders so near him; and by dint of leading her to the stairway foot, and watching her up the landings, the governor made sure she had gone to her duty.

On the andirons the sticks which she saw Columb lay, an hour back, were still burning with spurts of flame; everything looked the same, except the still man on the bed, who had changed worlds since she pattered down to tea. And over the gray face in the bedclothes were bending a couple in a grief to move the heart of any one born of woman: his father and mother, whose acres and whose lavish style of living gave them great consideration everywhere, but who could not keep their only son.

"His forehead is warm yet," whispered this poor mother, piteously giving way at the bed to his shrinking wife.

Young Madam Atkinson wished she had not gone down to supper; it is disagreeable to have thwarted a last wish. But another reflection pushed that regret from its stool in a moment, and clad in a proof armor of infatuation, she replaced the dead hand in his mother's grasp, and gave up her bedroom to those who desired to mourn. The admired young chatelaine of Atkinson House stood to-night at a point in her life where mourning had small place. The briefest term of courtship was what was to be expected of Governor John.

Three days afterwards, Mr. Secretary Atkinson's funeral train climbed the hill to St. John's church, in the middle of an afternoon as cloudless, warm, fragrant, and sad as October days be. In the first coach sat Mrs. Atkinson alone, as was her right to ride, her little black mittened hands crossed upon her lap.

Mrs. Atkinson shivered at times in the mild air, bracing as wine, and she peeped out at the bier now and then when the battery of the fort and the guns of the Beaver riding in the harbor hurtled across the town, overpowering the tolling bells of St. John's. She was dumbly sorry for the stark form ahead of her, whose arms had been always open to her for seven years, and a good deal afraid of it, to tell the truth. Long years these were to young Mrs. Atkinson, although it seemed a short while since the match with him looked a grand thing to her, to her, a slip of a girl dwelling in a plain street in Boston; for to match with the heir of the rich Portsmouth Atkinsons, and to own their famous silver dishes, and to send for gowns to London shops, was to contract an alliance, as they say in our day. And the young, reticent man, who stood for all these good things, was speedily too deep in love with her sweet lips and wonderful skin to mind whether his bride possessed a heart or no.

And to-day he was going to his burial, out of this warm day which his widow gazed at and valued like a child of the sun, as she was. Ahead, by the bier, Dr. Moses, the eccentric retainer of the Atkinsons, marched clumsily, the seams of his worn, hired mourning coat showing well in the full light. Dr. Moses was a character, just missing in some points being that strange thing, a genius. Mrs. Atkinson wondered at his wiping his eyes. She did not feel like tears. For a moment she was startled vaguely because she did not. And then the coach stopped at the porch of old Queen's Chapel.

Up by the new porphyry font from Senegal they laid him, and spread a purple pall over him. She sat near enough to have touched this pall. "In the days of his youth," the rector was saying. It seemed such a pity, even to his fair unmoved wife "in the days of his youth." With a faint compunction and desire to make amends, she recalled well how he had loved her, and how, spaniel-wise, he had followed her about, giving everything and getting nothing; and, with an uncertainty of disposition which made Mrs. Atkinson like two persons, now proud and silent, and then gay and sweet, she

remembered what she might have made of the great Atkinson foreroom - a bright place, swarming with children, with a toast who had foresworn the Assemblies sitting at her wheel in their midst, and with a pale young fellow reading conceits to her out of his books. But even as she pictured this, with an uneasy conscience, an intoxicating sense of something more to her mind, and now possible, stole over her, and she felt the presence of the broad-shouldered governor in his canopied pew.

Then they carried the bier out of doors into the wind-swept cemetery of St. John's; and the widow, following in an independent, self-sufficing way, which made the family retainers stare at her curiously, felt touched suddenly by the stiff breeze of the making tide, and looked down upon the wonderful, stimulating landscape, where Portsmouth harbor lay like a map unrolled, with the blue sea encircling its islands and lapping its shores. It was a view powerful enough to tell upon even a selfish toast, but unfortunately only in a way to strengthen her for her own desires.. Perfumes from old-fashioned gardens at the foot of the cemetery slope mixed themselves with the salt scents, and moved Madam Atkinson. She shrank away from the tomb, and refused to look when the purple-veiled coffin was carried by her, and she drew a little nearer to Governor Wentworth, who stood also in the brittle, frost-bitten grass, his magnificent clothes of white satin and violet velvet flapping and blown about in the rushing wind.

he loved her. By a

It was over, she reflected; and she straightened her slim shape in a way which made mother-in-law Atkinson regard her jealously. This stalwart royal official with the ribbon and star loved not books, nor to watch landscapes, nor to repeat tiresome jokes by dirty townsmen upon paved street, look she could make his white, masterful hands quiver and work with nervousness. She could not be thus stirred, she reflected with curiosity, being new to selfexaminations and quite unaware that affection is a plant of growth, and is not depended upon for fruit before it has sprouted and come to leaf. Yet after her

fashion Mrs. Atkinson loved Governor John Wentworth, as Cleopatra loved Antony. Not that Cleopatra's affection could have been worth very much to any man, - bad, bold flower from a soil of selfpleasing. But the great Egyptian, and this lovely dame of Portsmouth, of the year of our Lord 1769, believed that what they had to bestow was as priceless as if it had grown from noble nature and inflexible honor.

"But, ma'am, I tell you this won't do," protested the governor that night, with his scarlet sleeve around the widow's trim waist. He had made haste to put off his mourning coat. "I'm to have the regulation of you, Frances. And I won't come into this house after you now. Faith! I won't."

A late bird was singing in a bush at the swinging window, and the sweet wind touched the lady's face. She liked to feel the wandering wind of twilight; it was akin to her restless self. But she did not look restless as her lustrous hair lay upon the governor's shoulder, and she returned his attentions silently and shyly until he was in a delirium of delight. And truly she was grateful to this gentleman, who was the first gentleman in New Hampshire, and was going to give her precedence of every woman in the province, — and yet whom she could wind around her finger.

"I'm not loath," said she softly, "to wed you; it's a great honor, to be sure. But there's my year of mourning, if it is a great honor, and all that."

"Your year of mourning, Frances! Your day, we will say. For by the Lord who made me, you'll be Lady Wentworth to-morrow!"

"To-morrow!" screeched Madam Atkinson, for her rippling speech was capable of waxing shrill. "And I to be a fit bride without new clothes!"

"Listen, Frances! By six of the clock to-morrow night I'll be in Boston for a whole milliner's shop with its tirewomen. And then, sweetheart, as soon as the gown is sewn "—

Madam Atkinson knew he meant it, and she always fancied a bold man. Her eyes flashed their liking as her pretty arm stole around his neck, and she murmured:

""Tis Wednesday to-day. I dare say on the tenth day hence, if you get enough sewing women.'

"And have off this black thing, Frances! I hate it, though why I know not; for poor Atkinson never did me any ill."

"O he's safe behind that stone door. What a door that is, though! And here be you and me in this comfortable room, John." And the beautiful face drew very near his.

"Nay, now, sweet! 'Tis an awesome fate to be shut up in that old tomb at his age," said her lover, kissing her, but feeling for one brief, disloyal minute that he would dislike to have his own death taken so coolly.

Plenty of seamstresses came up to Portsmouth by the next stage, with patterns of great flowered silks, which they fell to cutting and shaping and stitching, sitting in their stiff, unrelenting chairs in the bedroom of Widow Atkinson, who tried on and tossed over materials, and found fault and approved, as if she were to be a girl bride instead of the survivor of a solemn scene but a few days old.

"This is well," she said caressingly, to one particular dressmaker whose fits were perfection, as she stood complete in a filmy shortgown of a pattern of tulips and dragons, at the end of a day's work. "You'd best cut out the neck a bit more, though; can you not?" And she smiled serenely upon her long glass, in the full assurance of a satin skin deserving of yellow old laces, a dainty vision of what flesh and blood could be in her day and generation.

A dainty vision she was to Governor Wentworth, who was making his way into the room at that moment, to the scandal of the workers upon half-done bodices and tuckers, and who took his bride in his arms with the same consideration for the tirewomen as if they had been bronze figures. The governor's grace of bearing was not yet much marred by a dissipated life; and as he stood with the lady in the middle of the littered room, they seemed a couple out of the days when conscienceless creatures "took untroubled the things which seemed to them good; when scruples were not, nor right and wrong yet named."