MISTAKEN

T precisely 10 o'clock of an evening in early spring two figures might have been seen traversing that historic inclosure known as Boston Common.

They walked rather slowly, arm in arm, for the evening was a mild one-for Boston. An east wind had been blowing all day, and another would doubtless set in at sunrise, but just now there was only a soft soughing in the elmboughs far above their heads. A few stars gleamed palely through the hazy sky, and in still paler reflection upon the cold bosom of the pond. A faint earthy smell filled the air, suggesting thoughts of early violets and crocuses and the thousand and one pleasant things that follow in their train. What it suggested to the minds of this couple, whether they were in any way affected by it, it is impossible to tell.

Certainly in their gait or bearing there was nothing of the sentimental lingering and dallying that spring induces. The most sagacious observer would never have suspected them of being engaged; yet such was the fact. They had borne that interesting relation to each other for more than two years.

Nearly every one who knew them pronounced it a perfect match, and surely no two young people could have seemed to enjoy more complete community of thought, taste, and feeling than the clever young professor of chemistry, Orville Basford, and Electra, daughter of the late eminent scientist, Agamenticus Brown. That lamented man of learning, being denied the happiness of a son, and perceiving at an early date that in his only daughter he possessed uncommon intellectual material, had bestowed upon her the same careful mental training he would have brought to bear upon a boy. Also, with an amount of common sense not common in men of his profession, he had given her as far as possible the same physical training. The result was that Electra had grown to womanhood tall, shapely, and vigorous as to body, keen, thorough, and ambitious as to mind. Her face, while not exactly pretty, was mobile and frank. Her eyes and mouth were particularly good, complexion brilliant, and she had a great quantity of fair hair, brushed smoothly back from her broad, low forehead. This fashion of wearing the hair at the very height

PREMISES.

of the bang and frizz period, together with an almost nun-like simplicity of dress, gave Electra at once, wherever she appeared, a certain stamp that set her, somehow, apart from other girls of her age, even in intellectual Boston. Young men the world over are a little shy of young women with a reputation for much learning, and in Boston they are no exception. Not that they were not attracted, and strongly, too, by this Juno-shaped, rosy, frankly smiling young creature, but it was not pleasant to see her charming eyes take on a far-away look, or smile suddenly over their very shoulders at some bald and wrinkled old scientist who happened to appear just as they believed they had created a feeling of interest in her breast.

Young Professor Basford was as unique in his way as was Miss Brown in hers. Of frail physique, he had never been able to join to any extent in the vigorous exercise of rowing, skating, fencing, and the like, which had formed no unimportant part of Electra's training. From others, such as archery, his defective eye-sight debarred him. As his doting mother expressed it, "Orville was all brain." And really, his tall figure was so attenuated, his bulging forehead so very conspicuous, that no doubt she was right.

Professor Brown had found him a highly satisfactory pupil. He had shared Electra's private lessons with her father, finding in her a mind that more than kept pace with his own. They were at the same time a spur and a help to each other, and the old professor found intense pleasure in comparing the processes and fostering the growth of these two remarkable young minds.

Yet, although the young man's character was as stainless as his intelligence was fine, Professor Brown would as soon have dreamed of uniting that splendid creature, his daughter, to the skeleton of an ichthyosaurus or megatherium as to poor Basford with his chronic invalidism and morbidness. But nature is stronger than reason, and the poor fellow had a heart in that hollow chest of his that was bound to grow warm under such protracted exposure to the radiant charms of a girl like Electra. At what particular season it lightly turned from logarithms to love, who can tell? It came out some months after the death of Professor Brown, fortunately that they were engaged, and, as has been said, the announcement met with almost unanimous approval.

But let us return now to this particularly wellmatched couple, who by this time have nearly reached the steps leading into Beacon street, near which was situated the residence of the Browns. They were strangely silent. It might have been the profundities of the lecture to which they had been listening that occupied their minds, or was it love's eloquent silence that possessed them? There was no trembling of the hand that clasped the young man's angular elbow, but now and then a sigh did agitate the breast of his light spring overcoat and mingle with the sighing of the elms, and once he shivered perceptibly.

"Are you cold?" asked Miss Brown. "Yes, a little," answered Professor Basford. "I think I was a little hasty in resorting to my spring coat."

"I walked eight miles this afternoon," said the girl with a slight, very slight, suggestion of irony in her tone," and found it warm work. I am never cold!"

The professor was silent, but presently was heard to sigh again.

Miss Brown made a little gesture with her fine shoulders that savored strongly of irritation. Not until they stood on the upper step of the tall flight reaching to the door of her home, with the sound of the bell echoing through the hall, was the silence again broken. "Won't you come in, Orville?" asked the young girl in a manner strangely perfunctory, all things considered.

The young man seemed to hesitate. His head was bent with a dejected air; his whole frame, in fact, expressed dejection. As a lover he was a depressing spectacle. Miss Brown's foot tapped the step rapidly. She looked as if she might come out with some incisive little question or remark, but just then the door was opened, and without a word Professor Basford followed her into the back parlor.

The servant, after turning up the gas, left them alone, standing on the hearth-rug opposite each other. Miss Brown, putting one neatly booted foot on the fender, leaned against the mantel and gazed with a kind yet quizzical look at her lover. Seen by gaslight his appearance was even less exhilarating than before, in the dim light of the street. Always pale, his thin face was now haggard, and showed the working of some agitating thought, and beneath his sparse, sandy mustache his lips were seen to quiver.

As she looked at him the girl's inclination towards irony vanished. Accustomed as she was to her lover's supersensitiveness, and aptness for needless suffering, she saw that something unusual was troubling him now; so she put her hand on his shoulder, saying kindly: "What is it, Orville ?"

The young man's face took on a look of relief. The question had helped him somewhat. He threw his head back, flushing a little, as if preparing for a conflict.

"I have something to say to you, Electra," he said, turning towards the little sofa they generally occupied together. "Sit here by me, dear."

"Won't you lay aside your overcoat? You might take more cold going out, you know." "It does n't matter," he answered absently. Electra, however, divested herself of her wraps before taking her place at his side. For a while he sat silent, steadily staring at his own long, narrow feet incased in arctics. The girl on her part looked as steadily at the slim, drabclad figure by her side, the close-cropped head, sallow, pointed face, and spectacled, downcast eyes. Electra's taste, though severe, was in the right direction always. It occurred to her for the hundredth time that Orville should not wear drab clothes, and she made up her mind to tell him so at once.

There was something in her cool scrutiny eminently disconcerting, and each time poor Basford looked up, the words he would have uttered died on his lips.

"Well," said Electra, again noticing his agitation, "what is it?”

Now he faced her with a sickly smile. "You make it hard for me, Electra," he said, his voice shaking.

"How so?" she asked. Really there must be something unusual under all this agitation; something more than a morbid fancy. "Orville, you frighten me!" she went on, fully in earnest now. "What is the matter?"

Basford seized both her hands, and leaned towards her with a determined look on his wan features.

"Electra," he said, " tell me, first of all, that you are quite sure of the nature of my love for you; its purity, its strength."

"I never doubted either," she answered with gentleness.

"It has been no ordinary love," he went on in a hoarse voice. "It existed as long ago as I can remember my own existence, and has grown steadily. You always were, you always will be, to me, the queen of womankind, my perfect womanly ideal."

Electra colored at these high words, and looked at her lover with some apprehensiveness. There was a wildness in his glance, a trembling in his voice and his entire form, that made her almost afraid that his mind was unsettled. But after an instant she forced herself to assume a playful air, and to say laughingly :

"If you talk to me in that way, Orville, are you not afraid of developing in me just that

"Indeed!" returned Electra, losing her brightness in spite of herself.

"Electra," went on Basford, "since our engagement took place I have bestowed a great deal of earnest thought upon the subject of of marriage."

Really!" murmured Electra, trying again to rally. "Really! How very strange!'

"Not upon our marriage alone," rapidly continued Basford, "but upon marriage in the abstract, and upon its diverse action upon the man and the woman. To sum up the result of my observations, I have found that what has always been asserted by champions of your sex is true beyond cavil. Marriage to a man is but an incident of his life, neither making nor marring his career, even by the added sense of responsibility it lays upon him, giving incentive and impetus to his efforts. On the other hand, in woman, marriage by its immense requirements in other directions arrests intellectual development. Cabined, cribbed, confined in the walls of her home, the most gifted, highly organized, and ambitious woman is dwarfed and, as it were, obliterated. The only alternative is neglect of all the sacred claims of maternity, of childhood, of home-keeper. The lot of the average married woman is, I may say-" Here, to his utter amazement and chagrin, Electra, whose face had undergone a score of changes meantime, interrupted him with a burst of frank, wholesome laughter.

"If I did not see the speaker before me," she said, "I should fancy I was listening to one of Miss Scranton's harangues. Orville, what has come over you to-night?

Professor Basford did not smile, but shook his head with an air of solemn reproach.

"Miss Scranton is a noble woman," he said; "misunderstood and undervalued by the very objects of her love and heroism. She has told me herself that she finds more sympathy and encouragement among men than among her own sex. Strange paradox! Of course you, Electra, although so immeasurably above most women of your age in mental capacity and acquirement, cannot comprehend the marriage question in all its bearings. It is even—a— undesirable that you should do so. How can one so young, so guarded as you have been from evil, so imbued with lofty thought and sentiment, be made to realize that marriage, while a sacrament, is also a sacrifice, at which man is high-priest and woman the victim ?" Electra had withdrawn her hands from her

"It has always seemed to me that in marriage between two human beings who are thoroughly in sympathy with each other, as we have always been, Orville, there could be no question of sacrifice. And even were it as you say," she added still more softly, "is not sacrifice the very essence and spirit of love?"

"You speak like the true, sweet woman that you are," said Basford in deep emotion. "You prove, if proof were needed, that my estimate of you is the correct one. And for that reason, Electra, because you are all that is grand and lovely in woman, I will not see you wrecked upon the unstable sea of marriage. No, Electra," he cried, starting to his feet and pacing the floor in great excitement; "because I love you far beyond myself, because I perceive your splendid possibilities, because I see in you one who, free to act, may rise to the highest eminence, and become a beacon to her sex and to the world, I refuse to immolate you. You shall see, the world shall see, that I, too, can sacrifice. Electra," he continued, stopping before her -"Electra, I renounce all claim upon your hand. You are free."

The young man was fairly transfigured by emotion. His shoulders no longer stooped, his head was erect, and his really fine features illumined by that most exalted of human passions the passion of self-immolation.

Electra, white and rigid, sat looking up at him with a bewildered stare. No doubt of her lover's sincerity entered her mind. Basford's conscience was abnormally developed. She had often told him that he was of the stuff that produced martyrs and fanatics. She was too just not to admire his magnanimity, yet far too feminine not to feel the sharpness of being renounced, be the motive ever so high and holy. So, when she at last spoke, after a pause during which poor Basford's sacred fire begun to sink and smolder, her voice had a cold, measured tone that struck into him like a knife.

"Do I understand," she said, "that you wish me to regard our engagement as―broken ? ” At this question, so proudly delivered, and accompanied by so cold a glance, the poor fellow's heroic fire again flickered and went suddenly out. He sank limply into the nearest chair.

"You put it in a way," he said tremblingly, "that shows how utterly I have failed to make my motives clear. Electra, I will make another attempt-'

She put up her hand as if to ward off a blow.

"No," she said. "I comprehend you thoroughly, and—and appreciate your motives. Of course❞— faltering a little- "of course all this is a surprise to me, and rather overwhelming at first. Not having accustomed myself to look at things in just this light, you cannot expect me to rise to your level at once, you know."

She was not looking at him at all, but at a bust of Sappho which stood at the other side of the room.

The young man himself seemed for some moments too utterly crushed by her words to find any with which to reply. As she was not looking at him he could look at her, long and fixedly, as though taking a sort of inventory of the priceless treasure he was renouncing. That fine head, with its crown of glorious tresses; those deep, bright eyes, soft cheeks, and fresh lips; that symmetrical bust, and those long, classically graceful limbs; more than all these, the rare mind and warm heart that animated them—all, all could be his to hold and keep through life; yet he must renounce, he already had renounced, them forever. Not a shadow of a thought of withdrawing what he had said existed in his mind. The struggle had been going on for months; its fiercest anguish was over. What remained was the sight of Electra's sufferings, and the certain knowledge that, for the present, he must bear her anger and perhaps contempt.

At last he roused himself with a great sigh and rose to his feet, and stood looking down upon her most sadly, with gentle reproach and pleading.

"I will leave you now, Electra," he said, "trusting to your noble heart to acquit me of this seeming cruelty, that is really the purest kindness. I would die by torture, if need be, to spare you a moment's pang. What I am now doing for you will one day appear to you in its true light. Of myself I say nothing. I shall go out into the world and find my work. You, too, Electra, will find yours some work more worthy of you than any the most favorable marriage could offer. At no distant time you will be ready to thank me on the bended knees of your soul for setting you free. Goodnight, Electra."

He took one of her apathetic hands in his cold fingers and touched it with his very icy lips.

"Good-night," murmured the girl frigidly. A moment later the house-door closed, and the long, drab figure was wending its way through the now falling drizzle to his lonely bachelor lodgings.

ELECTRA looked a little pale and abstracted at breakfast the next morning; but Mrs. Brown,

a good little woman of purely domestic habits, respected her superior daughter as she had respected her superior husband, and asked no questions. At the usual hour Electra went to her classes,- she was a teacher of physics in one of the high schools,—and directly after tea retired to the little hall room used by her as study, laboratory, and boudoir in one. But after an hour or so she descended to the back parlor, where Mrs. Brown sat knitting in the society of Belisarius, a Maltese cat of enormous size and warlike character.

For some moments the tall, erect young woman stood by the fire looking down halfabsently, half-lovingly, upon the little mother in the easy-chair. The little mother looked up, and their glances met in that composed, confidential, assured way that marks the very closest tie. Mrs. Brown said not a word. She saw that her daughter looked grave, and that she had laid a letter upon the mantel. She knew that something was coming, and bided Electra's time without exhibiting impatience.

"Mother," said the girl quietly, after a while, "would it trouble you very much to know that my engagement to Orville Basford is broken off?"

The knitting fell from Mrs. Brown's fingers upon her black cashmere lap.

"Electra!" was all she said aloud, but her heart gave a sudden cry of "Thank God!" that was a surprise even to herself.

"Yes, mother dear," said Electra; "it is broken off."

"Why - by whom for what reason?"

stammered Mrs. Brown.

"By Orville himself," calmly answered the girl, with a smile.

"Why, I thought he worshiped you!" cried her mother, utterly amazed.

"You thought right, mother. Worship' is exactly the word. He has placed me upon a pedestal, and prostrated himself before me. In short, he worships me to the extent of considering me far too good 'for human nature's daily food.'

Electra's voice sounded a little hard as she said these words, and her smile was more bitter than sweet. Suddenly her manner changed, however, and dropping upon the hassock at her mother's feet she laid her head against her knees, saying, as she had said so many times when a little child about to impart some childish experience:

"I'll tell you all about it, mother. I had noticed for a long time that Orville was very much disturbed about something, but I thought" with a little smile,—" it was his nerves, or his digestion, or his eyes; you know he is always conjuring up some bugbear, poor fellow. Last night, however, it all came

out. It was n't his nerves or his digestion; it was his conscience. The sum and substance of the matter is, that he has come to the conclusion that I am far too exalted a being to partake of the common lot of woman-'to spin, bear children, and weep.' I am to climb the highest pinnacle of fame, and sit there in solitary state, instead of having a home like other women, and a husband to take care of me, and little children to love me. In short, my dear mother, Orville refuses to marry me. That is all."

"The fanatic!" cried Mrs. Brown, divided between indignation and wonder. "To give up a girl like you for a theory! The man is mad."

"The world always says that of exceptionally noble people, you know," said Electra. Mrs. Brown's feelings took another turn.

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Electra, my daughter, do I read you correctly? You have had a great shock; you are pained, but-your heart is not broken. Am I right?"

"Entirely so, mother," the girl answered. The mother folded the pale, tearful, yet smiling face to her bosom.

"Thank God!" she whispered, over and over again. "Thank God!"

She did not say how much of this thankfulness arose from her release from the anxiety that this engagement had ever caused her. With all Basford's fine qualities, he was not the husband that she desired for her glorious daughter. This very act of his proved that she was right. She could not even be angry with him, so intense was her relief. She even began to pity him.

"Poor Orville!" she said aloud. "How has he ever arrived at such a point?" Then, with a deep sigh, she mechanically resumed her knitting. "Electra, you are a strange girl. Do you know, I thought you cared more for Orville; though I could not understand how you could-in that way."

A rich color dyed the girl's cheek and neck as she answered:

"I don't think I understood myself in the matter. I have known him so long, and we were so congenial in our tastes, that it came about in a natural sort of way. It was very pleasant to think that we should always study and work together. I have never thought to question my feelings for him. But last night, after he left me, I could not sleep, and I-I think I found myself out at last. I was shocked and angry with myself at first, when I found how little the thought of-of not marrying him disturbed me. In fact "—with a deep blush"I think it was an actual relief to me that it was

not to be. I suffered only because I was not more unhappy, and because he seemed to suffer so, poor fellow. It is right that he should know how I feel, and I have written him all about it. It may help him to be less miserable."

Mrs. Brown smiled dubiously over Electra's head. It struck her that the discovery of the state of Electra's emotions would scarcely prove consolatory, even to a lover of Basford's extraordinary type.

"And so," added the girl, throwing her arms about her mother, "and so it is over, and I hope you are not sorry that I again belong to you entirely."

A week, perhaps, had passed. Again it was evening, and again Mrs. Brown sat knitting before the cozy grate fire, while Belisarius purred slumbrously at her feet. Mrs. Brown was thinking; so deeply that she did not hear the ringing of the door-bell, and was quite startled by the subsequent entrance of a young man. This young man was of medium stature only; yet so well built, and carrying himself so erect, as to appear rather tall than otherwise. There was also something free and graceful in his movements that suggested the athlete. His face, though neither handsome nor intellectual, expressed in a high degree strength, virility, and that quality of chivalrous tenderness, shown most in his soft, dark eyes and smiling mouth, that makes a man irresistible in a woman's eyes. Above all, he looked cleansouled and independent, and, it may be added, was scrupulously well dressed. In short, Richard Fanshawe, attorney by profession, was a man whose entrance into any circle sent the mercury to just that happy figure when good spirits were a matter of course. That he was quite at home in Mrs. Brown's little back parlor was evident, for that lady smiled brightly at him without rising, and pointed at an easychair in her close vicinity.

"Now, that is very kind of you, Dick," she said, "to drop in on an old lady like me. I was getting quite dull. Electra is out, you know."

"She is? Then for once in my life I am glad of it, Aunt Fanny. I 've got something on my mind; and I'm awfully afraid of Electra."

"Well," said Mrs. Brown, resting a kind look on his rather embarrassed face, "relieve your mind of its burden, Dick. I am quite alone, except for Belisarius; and you can put him out if his presence annoys you."

But this assurance did not bring about an immediate outpouring of the subject weighing upon Mr. Dick Fanshawe's mind. He seemed to be laboring under a sudden attack of timidity.