For Woman's Love. Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth

up to old Scythia's hut," concluded Mr. Fabian.

      "Oh, do, Rule! Please do!" pleaded Cora.

      Regulas, with his sturdy independence of spirit, would most likely have declined this favor had not the girl's beseeching face and voice persuaded him to accept it.

      "I thank you very much, sir," he said, and promptly climbed to the seat.

      Three miles down the road the carriage was pulled up at the foot of the highest point of the mountain range, and Rule came down from his perch beside the coachman, stepped up to the carriage window, took off his hat, thanked the occupants for his ride, and then drew a neat, white inch-square parcel from his vest pocket, and holding it modestly, said:

      "I hope you will accept this, Miss Cora."

      The girl took it with a smile, but before she could open her lips to express her thanks, the youth had bowed, turned from the carriage, and was speeding his way up the rough mountain path, springing from crag to crag up to the ledge on which old Scythia's hut stood.

      Cora opened the parcel and found an inch-square little casket of red morocco. She opened this with a spring, and found a small gold heart reposing in a bed of white satin.

      "How pretty it is!" she said softly to herself, as she took the trinket from its case. "Look, grandma, what Rule has brought me for a Christmas gift! A little gold heart! A pure gold heart! His is a pure gold heart, is it not?" she added, earnestly, as she placed the trinket in the lady's hand.

      Mrs. Rockharrt looked at it with interest, and then passed it on to her eldest son.

      The ride was continued, and presently the carriage was driven off the boat and up the avenue leading to the house. As the vehicle drew up before the front doors, a pretty picture might have been seen through the drawing-room windows.

      A bright fireside, an old man reclining in his luxurious arm-chair; a beautiful girl seated on a hassock at his feet, reading to him, and at intervals lifting her lovely blue eyes in childish adoration to his face. They might have been grandfather and granddaughter, but they were, in fact, old Aaron Rockharrt and Miss Rose Flowers—Merlin and Vivien again, except that the Iron King was rather a rugged and unmanageable Merlin.

      Meanwhile, Regulas Rothsay had climbed the rugged mountain path that led to Scythia's hut. On the back of the broad shelf of rock on which the hut stood was a hollow in the side of the precipice. Scythia had cleared out this hollow of all its natural litter. Before this apartment she had built another room, with no better material than fragments of rock found on the spot, and filled in with earth, moss and twigs. She had roofed this over with branches of evergreens piled thick and high, to keep off rain and sun. A heavy buffalo robe, fastened with large wooden pins at its top to the roof of the hut, served for a door. There was no window. In the inner or cavernous apartment she had built a rude fire-place and chimney going up through a hole in the rock. A pallet of rough furs and coarse blankets lay in one corner of this room, and a few rude cooking utensils occupied another. In the outer room there was a rough oak table and two chairs.

      Up before the edge of this natural shelf on which the hut stood appeared the tops of a thicket of pine trees that grew on the mountain side fifty feet below. Up behind this shelf arose other pines, height above height, until their highest tops seemed to pierce the clouds.

      When Rule reached this shelf, he found the tops of the pine trees, the ground, and the hut all covered with snow.

      "Good morning, mother! A merry Christmas to you!" said Rule, gayly.

      "I hope you have made yourself as comfortable as possible in this place," said the youth, anxiously.

      "Yes, Rule! always as happy and as much at ease as my past will permit."

      "Oh! what is—what was this terrible past?" inquired the youth—not for the first time.

      "It was, it is, and it ever will be! This past will be present and future so long as I live on this earth. And some day, when time and strife and woe have made you strong and hard and stern, I will lift the veil and show you its horrible face! But not now, my boy! not now! Come in."

      As the weird woman said this she led the way into the hut, where the rude table stood covered with a coarse white cloth and adorned with two white plates and two pairs of steel knives and forks. Here the Christmas dinner was eaten, and afterward the two began a close conversation.

      "Mother," said the youth, "I shall have to leave here to-morrow night. I should go away so much more contented if I could see you living down in the village among people. Here you are dwelling alone, far from human help if you should require it. The winter coming on!"

      "Rule! I hate the village! I hate the haunts of human beings! I love the wilderness and the wild creatures that are around me!"

      "But, mother, if you should be taken ill up here alone!"

      "I should get well or die; and it would not in the least matter which."

      "But you might linger, you might suffer."

      "I am used to suffering, and however long I might linger, the end would come at last. Recovery or death, it would not matter which."

      "Oh, Mother Scythia!" said the youth, in a voice full of distress.

      "Rule! I am as happy here as my past will permit me to be. I abhor the haunts of the human! I love the solitude of the wilderness. The time may come when you too, lad, shall hate the haunts of the human and long for the lair of the lion! You will rise, Rule! As sure as flame leaps to the air, you will rise! The fire within you will kindle into flame! You will rise! But—beware the love of woman and the pride of place! See! Listen!"

      The face of the weird woman changed—became ashen gray, her form became rigid, her eyes were fixed, her gaze was afar off in distant space.

      "What is it, mother?" anxiously demanded the youth.

      "I see your future and the emblem of your future—a splendid meteor, soaring up from the earth to the sky, filling space with light and glory! Dazzling a million of eyes, then dropping down, down, down into darkness and nothingness! That is you!"

      "Mother Scythia!" exclaimed the youth, in troubled tones.

      The weird woman never turned her head, nor withdrew her fearful, far-off stare into futurity.

      "That is you. You are but a poor apprentice. But from this year you will soar, and soar, and soar to the zenith of place and power among your fellows! You will be the blazing meteor of the day! You will dazzle all eyes by the splendor of your success, and then, 'in an instant, in the twinkling of an eye,' you will drop into night, and nothingness, and be heard of no more!"

      "Mother! Mother Scythia! Wake up! You are dreaming!" said Rule, laying his hand on the woman's shoulder and gently shaking her.

      "Oh, what is this? Rule! What is it?"

      "You have been dreaming, Mother Scythia."

      "Have I?" said the woman, putting her hands to her forehead and stroking away the raven locks that over-shadowed it.

      And gradually she recovered from her trance and returned to her normal condition. When Rule was quite sure that she was all right again, he said:

      "Mother Scythia, I am going to Rockhold to see the friends there who have been kind to me. But I will come back to spend the night with you."

      "Well, lad, go. Why should I try to hinder you? You must work out your destiny and bear your doom," she said, wearily, with her forehead bowed upon her hands, as if she felt the heavy prophetic cloud still over-shadowing and oppressing her.

      "Mother Scythia, why do you speak so solemnly of me, and I only in my nineteenth year?" gravely inquired the youth, who, though he had been accustomed to the weird woman's strange moods and stranger words and deemed them little less than the betrayals of insanity, yet now felt unaccountably troubled by them.

      "Yes; you are young, but the years fly fast; and I—I see the future in the present. But go,