He bowed to her ruling; could do no otherwise. He might neither invite her to make a ceremonious acknowledgment of a past irregularity, nor to live with him in what would have had the appearance to the world of a scandalous intimacy. There was in truth ample excuse for the lawyer's doubt about the validity of their union, but not the lover's. During the assizes Mistress Alliott had taken the opportunity, without her niece's privity, to consult a learned special pleader, a Catholic. The only fixed part of his opinion was a doubt whether there had been sufficient cohabitation. Mistress Alliott delicately hinted the existence of a child. He shook his head, and finally opined that it might amount to a marriage for some purposes if not for others. Being asked which some and which others, he suggested that the parties might bring a collusive action to settle--or unsettle it. And that was all Mistress Alliott got for her guinea.

On that same October 1st came Master Trivett from Nottingham with the quarterly interest, and Press, after dallying for twenty years, consented to ride behind him to the parsonage at an hour's notice and make a marriage of it. When they returned, she fortified herself with a pinch of snuff on the door-mat, left her husband there and went in to her mistress.

"Prithee, ma'am," she said, and curtsied, "I've two askings to ask you." "What may they be?"

"The first is that you'll be pleased once to call me Mistress Trivett, so I may tell how I like of it."

"Mistress Trivett, I wish you and Master Trivett joy with all my heart," said Fortuna, and kissed her maid very kindly on each cheek.

tongue's end this morning to bid my poor pennyworth call you Mistress Bond."

"You would have done ill; I am still Mistress Surety, and shall always be."

"You told me last night, ma'am that

But here Press stopped, turned and looked at the door, saw that it had a keyhole, stooped and whispered in Fortuna's ear.

"It holds true, Press," answered Fortuna.

Press knitted her brows at her mistress as if she were trying to read small print.

"Then why not Mistress Bond, ma'am?"

Fortuna sat down and seemed to be choosing. At last she said:

"I am only forty-one."

"And don't hardly seem thirty-one," said Press, "now you have gotten your color back."

I

"Forty-one and some odd months. Little hands are strong, Press. should not like my Roland to be pushed never so little from me."

"Pugh! he's eight mile off a'ready with the push of two full-grown Gipsy hands. If you told me you didn't want to begin again with slobbering-bibs and suck-bottles I could understand it; but it's in my mind, ma'am, as you've deceived me just a-purpose to get rid of me. You've taught me, what I never knew before, how like I am to a fool. And I was thinking, marry come up, to bring some mite of understanding into this precious partnership 0' mine."

She went out of the room before Fortuna could answer.

"Where are you going to, my pretty maid?" screamed the parrot after her. I am afraid that Master Trivett's next quarter of an hour with his bride was a bad one.

Roland too had been misled by his

expectation of Fortuna's ambiguous words. He had not doubted that a public avowal of his father's and mother's marriage would immediately ensue upon his own. Disappointed of that, he would fain have had her go and live with him and Alfa or at least take a commodious house near them. To his surprise, somewhat to his displeasure, she refused to do either. He did not consider it a sufficient excuse that her flowers would not bear transplanting. She as firmly and on no better ground declined her aunts' invitation to Ashover.

Mr. Bond rented a farmhouse in Kirkby parish, such as he could get, but very unsuitable as the neighborhood thought to the dignity of an exjudge; and it was his daily custom to walk or slowly ride past her cottage, if perchance he might catch a glimpse of her at her window or see her working in her garden or even speak to her over the hedge. She never invited him in, but for many years she never once failed to show herself to him from one place or another. Father and son met but seldom, and I do not think they were ever quite at ease in each other's presence. The remembrance of that trial and what led up to it would never, I think, be quite out of their minds. The father could hardly help looking on the son as a judge, and the son on the father as something very like the accomplice of his real errors and the suborner of his false accusations.

Fortuna's aunts effected a reconciliation between her brother and her. But she never saw him again; he died ten years later of wounds received at the battle of Leuthen and left her his considerable wealth. Alfa's father perished more obscurely in the Scottish campaign. Roland made every inquiry, but could never learn whether he died of flux or fever or more herolike by the hand of a fellow-man. All

that was known was that Basil Lee no longer answered to his name at the muster of his company.

After five years of such sober bliss as matrimony could afford him Master Trivett departed this life. As soon as he was put underground-buried in woollen as per affidavit-and his affairs settled, his widow drove to the Nook, let herself in, paid the lady'smaid in office her only half-earned yearly wage out of her own pocket, gave her an hour to pack up her alls, and sent her off in the post-chaise in which she herself had arrived. Then she changed her own dress for a waiting-woman's cap, tucker, white linen jacket and petticoat, went in to Fortuna and made her a waiting-woman's curtsy.

"My humble duty to you, ma'am," she said. "I am Widow Trevitt now, and at liberty for your service on the same terms as afore.

"You will always have your own way with me, Press," said Fortuna, and threw a bunch of keys on to the table that stood between them.

"Then, ma'am, please to come up to your chamber at once, and I'll curl your hair as it hain't been done of these five years. Your last woman seems to have thought that roundeared caps was doomed to be in for everlasting. And only us waitingwenches wear white aprons now. Besides your gown is full plain enough, and the sleeves are a good inch and a half out o' the fashion. But I promise you, ma'am, you shall have a gown ready for to-morrow's dinner as modish as any at the last birth-night."

At that a litle fair-haired child with large dark eyes came from behind Fortuna's hoop, holding the head of a doll in one dimpled hand and the body in the other.

"My humble service to you, little missy," said Press.

"We call her Fortuna," said her mis

cott, Tucson, Globe, Tombstone, or Phoenix.

But there was the Judge, and there was I; and I had not said quite what I meant. I had intended to ask in polite phrase which could not raise ribald laughter, "Did you ever play Faro, Judge?" In the circumstances that would have been enough to make the stope resound, but to ask him if he had seen it played was like asking a Missourian if he had ever heard of the Missouri River.

A

But they were of the right stuff, those noble souls of the Yavapai Club. I saw one man turn and lean with sudden weakness on the shoulder of a robust visiting Army officer. Another closed his eyes, as though he could not bear the dim light of the stope. third dropped his glass on the bar and looked helplessly around. Two in the rear made for the door like miners from a lighted fuse; but all the rest stood as though I had thrown a gun at them and said, "Hands up!" And no man looked at me save one. As though I had suddenly and unwillingly been stripped before them, they turned away their heads.

Benevolent, reflective, compassionate, the Judge stood and looked at me. His eye watered a little, his gaze seemed to go through me to something beyond; he held his glass of simple dope-sarsaparilla, I think it was-as you would a bunch of flowers given to you in broad daylight by one who knew that your self-possession would be sufficient for the occasion, and then he answered. "Some-once." And that was all.

But it was enough. Prescott is still laughing. They told it to John Lindell, who keeps the Palace Hotel, and who, that very day, had dragged up the discarded Faro bank from the cellar of a vacant saloon he had, and showed me how the game was played in his Hall of Pleasure but a few years ago; and

John Lindell rose up and guffawed, and said, "Oh, Hell!" quite often.

To the Judge, of all men in Arizona, I had said that thing; to the Judge, who was of those who elevated Faro into a Territorial institution with a national notoriety, in the days gone by. "Some-once," he said with that double meaning which, offering an intellectual truth in the vernacular, would in the straight language of a lexicon be qualification for that Ananias Club of which Mr. Roosevelt is the critic.

Had he ever seen Faro played? Is not the history of Arizona the tale of Faro and the Law? Those who were the children of the law visited at the House of Faro, and those who were quickened at Faro came to be Lords of the Law-or its victims. The Judge was one of these, the Lords of the Law. He had lived in Arizona in the days when the cattle-rustler, the miner, and the cowpuncher held his money lightly, and his life as lightly as the range-rider held the bridle-rein of his mustang; when the freebooter held up the Wells Fargo Express or the United States mail; when there was no court with any real existence except the court of the Lightning Hand, the only appeal from which was the lariat over the limb of a tree, provided by an offended public, who decided that the Lightning Hand had gone too far!

But Faro, that mystery of the Whole Western Outfit, has been overwhelmed by the flood of civilization, as completely as was the Egyptian Pharaoh by the waves of the Red Sea. No longer do the miners, the desert toilers, and the range-riders "freight" into Tucson, Prescott, or Phoenix from the heat and the dust and rough-neck toil, to spoil the Egyptians, to "shoot up the town." No longer does the barking gun make the bar-room ring with the roaring high spirits of the sons of the desert who, before they were the sons of the Arizona desert, were

sons of Alabama, Kentucky, California, Minnesota, or Connecticut. The dance-hall, the Faro bank, and the girls, who were the signs of prosperity of the mining camp and the city that lived on the mining camp, no longer "turn the hose" on the Cousin Jacks and the bronco-buster of the palaces of ribald joy. What I said to the Judge that made Prescott laugh-at me in one way and at the Judge in another-might have been said to fifty men in Arizona I had met, now at the top of the legal, or the railway, or the banking tree. Men in high positions, once in jumpers and leather chapararos and sombreros, were Faro players, and some were even professional gamblers, in the old days; and those days are not so far away; for a man is a pioneer in Arizona who has been there twenty years, and he is an old resident if he has been there ten years. They were one with-and at the top of the life as it was; and they are one with, and at the top of, the life as it is. It may be trite to say that packing the gun is a menace to civilization, but it is worth repeating. The other day, just before I arrived at Castle Hot Springs, two men had a dispute about payment for a mining claim. The dispute was only over a sum of money which did not represent a week's board and lodging. They met in the hills. Both were armed. They spat fire with their tongues for an instant, and then they opened fire with their guns. One was killed, the other went to the hospital terribly wounded. And there are districts where the criminal calendar is swollen enormously by gun packing. In one judicial area-I need not give the name-there were twenty-eight murders last year. This was in a population of eight or nine thousand people. The Judge who had jurisdiction there told me of a very dramatic case where a man charged with causing the death of two

girls by drowning, but generally believed to be innocent, was shot in a sensational way while in prison. Someone entered the chambers of the Judge, which overlooked the jail hospital, where the prisoner was confined, waited for hours-as the ashes of cigars, etc., in the chamber showedand then at dawn, when the prisoner could be seen through the hospital window, the unknown, but not unsuspected avenger of a wrong never committed, shot his victim dead in his bed. Then he quietly left the Judge's chambers with his gun, and got away in safety.

And yet to sojourn in the happy cities of Phoenix or Prescott, or to stay in such blessed retreats from the world's cares as Castle Hot Springs, in Yavapai County, or at Ingleside, near Phoenix, out by Camelback Mountain, is but to impress the sojourner with the feeling that here is a land of peace and pioneer comfort and safety. The Apache, the Mohave, the Piute are no longer on the warpath, and the reminders of them may only be found in places to which their depredations and slaughterings gave a name such as Burnt Ranch and Weeping Springs. But those days of early settlement were as full of danger as of heroism. Here is an instance.

I met at Castle Hot Springs a Roman Catholic Bishop. When he first went out to the mêsas, the cattle ranges, and the mines, over fifty years ago, there were a handful of people yonder; but now, as he told me, they are numbered by the thousands. The young priest, with a good Irish name, and a soft Irish accent which gives charm to a charming nature, and to a tongue which is ever adding to the language of peace and good-will of the world, had dark paths to tread in this land of sunlight and blue sky-the heavenly air of winter, and the scorching, searching, bleaching air of summer. He had a