y were happiest. Else, said the old street, they could
not keep up the old Winslow-Byington alliance so beautifully.

To the truth of this general outline the three homes' domestics,
dominated by Sarah Stebbens, certified with cordial and loyal brevity.
Yet when Ruth wrote Godfrey how well things were going, there lurked
between her bright lines one or two irrepressible meanings that locked
his jaws till they creaked.

In fact, both his brother and hers were "ailing." Both carried a jaded,
almost a broken look, and Arthur was taking things to make him eat and
sleep; while Leonard had daily accepted more and more of the young
rector's complicating cares, until he was really the parish's chief
burden-bearer.

"No," he said to his father, "Arthur carries his whole work manfully on
his own shoulders."

"But, my son," replied the old General, "don't you see you're carrying
Arthur?"

"No, I sha'n't do that," dryly responded the son; but Ruth saw a change
on his brow as on that of a guide who fears he has missed the path.

The four young friends spent many delightful evenings together in the
Winslow house, with Mrs. Morris and the General on one side at cribbage.
Ruth had frequent happy laughs, observing Isabel's gift for making
Leonard talk. It gave her a new joy in both of them to have the lovely
hostess draw him out, out, out, on every matter in the wide arena to
which he so vitally belonged; eliciting a flow of speech so animated
that only afterward did one notice how dumb as any tree on Bylow Hill
he had been in regard to himself.

"They are bow and violin," said Arthur to Ruth, with his dark, unsmiling
face so free from resentment that she gratefully wondered at him, and
was presently ashamed to find herself asking her own mind if he was
growing too subtle for her.

On these occasions Isabel was wont to court Ruth's counsel concerning
her wifely part in Arthur's work, thus often getting Leonard's as well.
Sometimes she impeached his masculine view of things, in her old
skir

Martha Finley (1828 - 1909) was a teacher and author of numerous works, the most well known being the 28 volume Elsie Dinsmore series which was published over a span of 38 years. The daughter of Presbyterian minister Dr. James Brown Finley and his wife and cousin Maria Theresa Brown Finley, she was born on April 26th, 1828 in Chillicothe, Ohio. Finley wrote many of her books under the psodonym Martha Farquharson. She died in 1909 in Elkton, Maryland, where she moved in 1876.

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