a given moment, harmless and useful.

His attitude was fatal to any free communication with her beloved. He
opened and read every letter that she had ever received. Had she
ventured to call for one at the post-office, the information would
have reached him that very day.

The problem was how to deceive him without placing herself at the
mercy of some friend.

She sat down in the arbour from which, past the trees of the orchard
and the neighbouring river, one had a view of the Russian forests, and
put the problem to her seventeen-year old brain. And while the summer
wind played with the green fruit on the boughs and the white herons
spread their gleaming wings over the river, she thought out a
plan--the first of many by which she meant to rivet her beloved
for life.

On the same afternoon she asked her father's permission to invite the
daughter of the county-physician to visit her.

"Didn't know you were such great friends," he said, surprised.

"Oh, but we are," she pretended to be a little hurt. "We were received
into the Church at the same time."

With lightning-like rapidity he computed the advantages that might
result from such a visit. The county-seat was four miles distant and
if the societies of veterans and marksmen in whose committees the
doctor was influential could be persuaded to come hither for their