The Fallen Leaves

in keeping her family name a secret: even the newspaper has grace enough only to mention her by her Christian name. I don’t want to cheat you out of your interest; so I will own at once tha

rhaps it was something in her expression that took our fancy. There! I can’t explain it; I can only say there were

ction. Rufus put an appropriate question: “D

Elder Brother (that’s the name we give to the chief of the Community) when two of the women led Miss Mellicent in. He’s a hearty old fellow, who lived the first part of his life on his own clearing in one of the Western forests. To this day, he can’t talk long, without showing, in one way or another, that his old familiarity with the trees still keeps its place in his memory. He looked hard at Miss Mellicent, under his shaggy old white eyebrows; and I heard him whisper to him

louded his bright young face. The two elder men looked at him in silence, feeling (in widely different ways) the

ff?” he asked, rousi

tizen with the white eyebrows being suitably engaged in moralizing o

your own free will? Do you bring with you a written recommendation from one of our brethren, which satisfies us that we do no wrong to ourselves or to others in receiving you? Do you understand that you are not bound to us by vows, and that you are free to leave us again if the life here is not agreeable to you?’ Matters being settled so far, the reading of the Rules, and the Penalties imposed for breaking them, came next. Some of the Rules you know already; others of smaller importance I needn’t trouble you with. As for the Penalti

are coming to the difficulti

free country in which I can love in one State, marry in another, and be divorc

on of falling in love with each other — the governing body takes the initiative. ‘You two will do well to marry; we see it, if you don’t. Just think of it, will you?’ You may laugh; some of our happiest marriages have been made in that way. Our governors in council act on an established principle: here it is in a nutshell. The results of experience in the matter of marriage, all over the world, show that a really wise choice of a husband or a wife is an exception to the rule; and that husbands and wives in general would be happier together if their marriages were managed for them by competent advisers on either side. Laws laid down on such lines as these, and others equally strict, which I have not mentioned yet, were not put in force, Mr. Hethcote, as you suppose, without serious difficulti

s declined to resign his interest in the lady. “A

new friends. They proved to be wrong. ‘My life has been one long disappointment,’ was all she said. ‘You will do me a kindness if you will take me as I am, and not ask me to talk about myself.’ There was nothing sulky or ungracious in the expression of her wish to keep her own secret. A kinder and sweeter woman — never thinking of herself, always considerate of others — never lived. An accidental discovery made me her chief friend, among the men: it turned out that her childhood had been passed, where my childhood had been passed, at Shedfield Heath, in Buckinghamshire. She was never weary of consulting my boyish recollections, and comparing them with her own. ‘I love the place,’ she used to say; ‘the only happy time of my life was the time passed there.’ On my sacred word of honour, this was the sort of talk that passed between us, for week after week. What other talk could pass between a man whose one and twentieth birthday was then near at hand, and a woman who was close on forty? What could I do, when the poor, broken, disappointed creature met me on the hill or by the river, and said, ‘You are going out for a walk; may I come with you?’ I never attempted to intrude myself into her confi