feast, at which Bluegrass embraced Pennerile with great and unprecedented enthusiasm.

"A great drubbing to you old Bluegrassers, great drubbing," cackled Major Spence.

"Well, drat your Pennerile impudence, boy, but sell me two of the black squealers, and I'll make Spence raise them by hand," laughed the judge as he buttered his last bit of corn-pone.

"I'm sure I'm still the champion mongrel-fryer raiser in the world, but I'll undertake one of your fifty-dollar Plymouth settings if I have to do the setting by hand, Mr. Robards," said Mrs. Cavendish, in the pause that followed the laugh at the major's and the judge's brush.

Most of the time I had kept my eyes on dad's sullen, unhappy face, but now for a second I held my breath and prayed for the wine of the miracle. A reluctant smile came about his handsome mouth and shone

in his big, dark eyes. He looked at me doubtfully for a second, as if to gather courage from my eyes, which seemed full to the brim of it and a queer new passion of child love for him, and then he, too, spoke in his big, booming voice, as everybody paused half fearfully to listen to him.

"I'll trade anything at Uplands, Robards, for Mrs. Butter, except Babs, of course," he said, and there was a queer sire note in his voice that had answered that foal call in my eyes. It was the first we had ever exchanged, and the glorious pain that darted through me seemed to beat out chords of a creation anthem in my breast.

"We're going to trade, Mr. Hardin, but let's make it larger than that," answered the hero of the hour, boldly, with never a glance in my direction. Our eyes had not met since the look he had given me that had completed the circuit between me and my motor, but I was sure that he understood what had happened to me. And I know now I shall always get some of my power current through him.

"Now see here, Robards, don't ask us to grade up our girls to make Pennerile wives. We don't have to," chuckled Judge Cavendish, as he raised his glass with a proud smile over at Mrs. Cavendish's stately, white head. "To our wives and sweethearts, the best, God bless 'em!"

Dinner was over, and they all rose to

his toast with a laugh; but as they drank, a thought shot through my brain that became the knife which cut through me to test my core. Suddenly I knew I had to go away by myself into some stillness to think and to ask my new-found self a question of honor. I fled down the steps of the grange house and out into the fair grounds.

Looking neither to the right nor to the left, I swung along the main road through the buildings, past the yelling ballyhoos of the side-shows, the sizzling hot-dog sandwich-places, the ice-cream booths, and the shooting-galleries. A soft-voiced Gipsy woman sat at the door of her tent and called to me as I passed:

"Tella yo' fortune, beautiful lady! Gooda fortune!"

I with a good fortune! With a sob in my throat I ran on and turned into a tent that was pitched back under a huge oaktree on a little knoll away from the heat and dust and noise. It was so quiet that it seemed deserted.

For a moment I stood puzzled in the cool dusk of its shady depths, and then suddenly a laugh lilted its way out of the seat of my risibles right past the tumult in my heart. I had plunged, in an agony of desperation from the wicked world, straight into the calm of the "Better Babies" tent, and the whole congregation was there to welcome me, part of it sitting staring wide-eyed at me through white crib bars, though most of it was inertly away in Napland. Weakly I echoed my first laugh, and sank down on a cot that held only one little, red-headed chubbykins of a two-year-old boy, anchored securely by two safety-pins, one on each side of his blue rompers. The nurse had evidently gone to get her lunch during a lull in her duties caused by so many noonday sleeps.

As I crouched beside him, Chubb gurgled and waved his hands helplessly in such pathetic distress that I untethered him carefully before I let the waves break over my head. And when the sobs did come, they were smothered on the small blue gingham breast of the mite as he clung and crowed, grateful for his release.

Then as we cooed and cried luxuriously, suddenly we were both folded hard in the strong Pennerile arms, and lifted against a broad, capable, wooing breast.

"Whose lost babies are these?" his sustaining voice asked as he kissed the back of both of our necks as if he had been doing it all our lives. There was not a note in his comfortable and trivial question that sounded as if he had just been through a disgusting and horrifying scene. "What's this, both of you prize-winners?"

In my perturbation I had failed to see that Chubb bore a tiny blue ribbon across his sturdy little breast, upon which I had cast my grief.

"Please go away from me and never, never let me see you again! It's the only way," I said in a low, shaky voice as I prepared to withdraw from the tangle of his and Chubb's arms.

"And leave the only blue ribbon I want still unwon?" he asked as he tucked Chubb under his right arm and made a hollow between his heart and his left to press me into. "I'm not going back to the Pennerile without a complete set. Be a sport and dare to let me kiss you five times before I ask you if you love me, prize here looking on as counter."

"No," I answered as I drew determinedly away and stood in the middle of the tent, leaving him with the baby in his arms. "No, your whole life you are giving to making things that measure up, and I'm not going to let you take something short into the very center of it. You have seen from what I came, and with your scientific knowledge you know better than I what I am and must always be. But because you do understand such things you are-are pitiful, like God is, and that is what made me love you the first time I ever saw you. Only this please believe, that while I am his bone and flesh, when I'm cut into, I 've got a soul. I got that from God. I've been feeling it ever since I saw yours in your eyes. I've found it because I need it to love you withand-and protect you from my own self. You must go away from me; I must make you."

Very quietly he deposited the baby in the middle of the cot and came over and stood in front of me, with both of my cold, trembling hands clasped firmly in his.

"Now I'm going to give you a little scientific talk on love before I take you in my arms for a final-which is going to be a final," he said with a sort of soft impatience. "The black spot on the Southdown,

the hard, green seeds in the tomato, the white feather in the black Minauka, and the crooked fore leg or fractious temper in the setter pup, all make them undesirable. They can be eliminated. But beyond and above all that we scientists are ever going to know about or be able to do with the human race is the fact that they have souls that come from God, as you say, and come from Him with the power and authority to know and claim their own mates. That there is no controverting. Science bows its head. I knew you and claimed you when I saw you pluckily stand by and watch me take the blue from that Jersey of yours Monday morning; and how much longer am I to wait here lecturing on agriculture and being sane?"

"Yes, I recognized you at that same time, and all week I have been fighting to get near you to get you. It was what made me put Spunk over those bars, to put myself in your blue-ribbon class, and -and three hours ago I would havehave accepted your-your sacrifice. But now I realize that I can't, that I must n't spoil your life. I've found the strength to -to send you away because it is best for you. There may be yellow in me-only go quickly." Again the pain back of my heart shook me with its force, but I looked him straight in the eyes with a denial that held him from me.

"If there ever was yellow in you, what became of it across those seven bars, under that crop, and at that still higher bar, the dinner-table?" he questioned me calmly, and as if impersonally diagnosing my case; while with one of his hands, which throbbed healing tenderness into me, he covered the dark stain on my shirt.

"It-it and fear fade when I am near you," I faltered, though still holding him

away.

"You never knew either one," he said firmly, finally, and triumphantly. “But now be honest with me; is n't there something here that is fighting for me with. more power than you knew existed?" He pressed his hand down hard over my heart.

"Yes, and it is what came down to me through the pity in your eyes when I was -was beaten-and gave back my pride and-strength to give you up," I answered, my fingers clutching his away from my heart, in order that I could get breath to speak.

WE

E are all favored by the Fates at times, but in the matter of Jacqueline the Fates not only smiled at me, but laughed aloud, and, laughing, called me "Brother."

I had left the train at Chatham Center, and was walking over to East Granby when I met her on the highway. She was preceded by a mustachioed and worldweary poodle, and followed, with even greater weariness, by a flaming-red rooster, and the moment I saw her I knew that I must either speak or die.

"Pardon me-" I began.

"M'sieur," she said, with an awful show of dignity for one so young, "it is not permit' to me to speak to stranger young gentlemen.”

"She 's French," I thought, with a deduction worthy of Dr. Watson; “eastern Connecticut 's full of them. But, Mademoiselle-" I began again.

"Nor am I mademoiselle," she objected for the second time. "M'sieurwhat you call it?-sings wizout his music. You know? I am Mees-Mees Harris."

"Then there was such a person, after all," I thought, with growing astonishment, and for the third time I essayed to speak. "Miss Harris," I said, "I spoke to you because I may have lost my way. Can you tell me if I'm far from East Granby?"

She had been studying me with grave attention, her reference to my sightsinging had been made in all seriousness, -and the poodle, on one side of her, mustachioed and wise-appearing beyond belief, and the tired, but fiery-red, rooster, on the other side of her, temporarily resting himself on one leg, had been studying me even more gravely yet. It seemed to be the consensus of their joint scrutiny that such a question as I had propounded

might be answered with every deference to the proprieties.

"M'sieur will find East Granby," she said, "direc❜ly over the hill."

"Directly over the hill," I repeated. And can you tell me where Mrs. Depuis lives?"

"But Mme. Depuis is my aunt!" cried the girl in some excitement. "It is the house near the lake, with six-six-what you call them?-six large popular-trees in front. You know?"

I knew I could n't miss six trees like those, but suddenly Miss Harris showed unmistakable signs that her excitement had culminated in a thrill.

"M'sieur," she earnestly exclaimed, "surely it cannot be possible that you are Meester Norman who wrote my aunt about boarding at her house for the summer?"

"I am the very one. And if an impostor has appeared upon the-"

"But, M'sieur," she continued to object,-and, oh, she objected most earnestly!-"Meester Norman is a much older man than it is possible for you to be, or my Aunt Gabrielle would never have written him to come and be surveyed. For did not I myself see his letter? And did he not write, 'I have been recommend' by my grandson to see if you would not take a summer boarder?' Yes, M'sieur! The ver' words which I myself peruse'. So, what, then?"

"It is," I said after a pause of reflection, "the fault of my writing. I remember writing now, I have been recommended by Mr. Grandon-'

Miss Harris laughed. Never in all my life had I heard anything half so enchanting. But all at once this divine sound ceased.

"I surprise myself laughing," she said,