Iron County register. [volume] (Ironton, Iron County, Mo.) 1867-1965, 1891-09-17

grimly overbrowed long, ivy-clad gar
den. Sylvan could recall some exquisite
spring days when those wonderful
white English clouds, in all their sun
drenched flocculence, floated over the
green tangles of that damp old garden
and made smile touch even the sad,
faded face of his mother.
Once, on such day. while they stood
in the tagged pathway that led be-
tween the mounds of freshened and
shimmering ivy she wrapped her arms
about him and tenderly said:
Doesn't this beautiful day make you
happy to breathe its air, Sylvan, and
catch the smell of its new leaves, its
timid young flowers?"
YES, mamma" the boy answered.
And don't you feel, darling, that
merely for being allowed to live in so
lovely a world you should grow very
grateful to God?'
'Oh. yes, mamma"
''What rubbish you do talk to that
child" said Egbert Maynard, who had
been watching and listening from the
near porch. He spoke coldly, but not
with harshness, and came in a loiter-
ing, absent way down the steps into
the garden. He was man with large,
gray, worried eyes, a face unhealthy
pale and a cOnsumptive stoop of the
shoulders.
At his words Mrs. Maynard put her
hands over the child's ears. and while
she still preserved her STOPPING atti-
tude, cried, in plaintive protest:
''Oh! Egbert. Before the child!
You've always till now been at least a
little circumspect in your bias
phemies!'
'Blasphemy is an affair of geogra-
ply said Maynard, with lazy satire in
his American voice. Among the Turks
you could make bonfire out of Bibles
and not cause the faintest popular
shock. Here in London you could do
the same with Korans and hardly
person would stop to look twice"
His wife shuddered. and drew Sylvan
closer to her breast. She was woman,
this Georgina Maynard, who had lost
her looks early in life. \ sweet. tall
eglantine of an English girl when May
nard had married her so brief time
ago. she was now prematurely aged,
with threads of gray in her golden hair
and pathetic droop at the corners of
the rosiest of little fieshly Cupid-bows
She had been the daughter of coun-
try parson. dwelling not far from Cam
bridge, whittier Egbert Maynard had
come full of youthful ardor to pursue a
course of chemistry and physics. May
nard was Massachusetts, man, who had
been graduated high at Harvard. Soon
after this collegiate success in his ma
ate inheritance left him by an uncle, al
most the last of his living relatives.
Until chance brought him face to face.
one day, with Georgina Selwyn, he
had never dreamed that love could slip
its glamours between himself and the
stout resolve to pack his mind with sci
entific lore at one of the greatest uni
verSitieS on earth
Some men wade into love, getting
deeper and deeper. as Indifference grows
desire. Some men plunge into it like
diver from wharf. Egbert Maynard
took the latter course, and almost be-
fore he knew it had told a tale of pas
sion to the last woman whom he should
ever have dreamed of making his wife.
The dominant influence of Georgina's
being was religion. She had no fam
boyant piety such as cynicism often
sneered at her father for possessing, but
since childhood she had set her spirit in
tune with strong faith. and her adorer
swiftly found that he must either WOO
her cloalled with deceit or not at all.
MAYNARD was man who had long ago
recoiled from orthodoxy. He believed
in nothing but science and stood amazed
at the very idea of his own capacity to
care for girl whose prayers and
church-goiugs were the regnant forces
of her existence. Hypocrisy, however,
soon came fatally easy to him Georg-
mas beliefs clothed themselves with
that same shining tissue of sorcery
which invested the turn of her white
wrist or the curves of her still pearlier
throat. He wanted her just as she was,
and in amorous hatred of displeasing
her he recklessly forgot the gravity of
his own falsehoods-
But her father, hedged in by what he
loatbed as the most autocratic conserva-
tisms, became such keen bore to him
during the term of courtship that one
day he hailed with secret relief the
calamity Of tia old parsons abrupt